Newsletter for February 14, 2012
"Codename: Heart of a Bird"
1. Newsletter EditorialGreetings. It's been about a month since we posted the results of our NANY 2012 event; if you haven't checked out the videos of all of the new free apps yet, you'll find a link in section 4 below -- I encourage you to give them a look.
Things have been a bit quiet on DC since then, except for the day we joined ranks with Wikipedia and went offline for 24 hours to protest and help kill the proposed SOPA legislation that would harm Internet freedom (see section 8 below), and except for a major new software release: Screenshot Captor 3.
I hope you will forgive me taking some space in the newsletter editorial to talk a bit about this release. I want to say thank you to all the Screenshot Captor users and testers, and especially the donators, who have made it possible for me to keep working on the program for all these years. Version 2 came out on September 3rd, 2005. That's six years and over 100 updates ago.
If you've not tried Screenshot Captor yet, this might be the perfect time to do so. And if you're already a user of Screenshot Captor but haven't yet made a
donation -- I'm hoping you will take this opportunity to do so -- it would mean a lot to me. Even better would be to take some time and use our DonationCredits system to distribute your donation to different members on our site whose work you want to support.
Lastly, I want to dedicate this Screenshot Captor Version 3 release to Gizmo's Tech Support Alert website, which gave Screenshot Captor its Best in Class award for screenshot tools. Gizmo has always been super supportive of this site, and I can't express how honored I feel to have Screenshot Captor receive that award. It motivated me to double my efforts to improve the program. See below for links to more reviews as well as some videos showing off the new features.
Oh yes -- and happy Valentine's day!
2. DonationCoder Software Updates and DiscussionsBelow you will find some updates and discussion threads for some of the main DC applications. The Screenshot Captor and Find and Run Robot releases this month also mark the start of a new process for packaging the releases. In the past each program had a single zip-compatible installer. The new releases are now provided as two separate downloads, a standard installer and a portable zip file. This should eliminate any confusion with portable versions and eliminate some partial download difficulties. In addition you will find the files are now digitally signed, which should eliminate some annoying warnings about unknown downloads in some browsers.
3. User-to-User: Your Input RequestedWe love nothing more than having interesting discussions on our forum -- and we love when new people participate in the discussions. In each newsletter we try to highlight a few topics that we think might interest casual readers and that are good candidates for making your first post.
4. DC Member Software ThreadsWe love to keep up with projects that our members are working on. This month quite a few of the projects from NANY 2012 are seeing some active development.
5. Mini-ReviewsWe are always interested in hearing what our forum members think of software they use.
6. General Software DiscussionAlmost half the posts on the forum fall into the category of general software discussions, questions, recommendations, etc. This is one of the most active sections of the DC forum and a great resource if you're trying to solve a software or hardware related problem. We get so much traffic on this board that we've split the recent content into sections in the newsletter - general software and specific software discussions.
7. Specific Software DiscussionThis section of the newsletter draws attention to some of the standout discussions about specific programs that have been started since the last newsletter.
8. Fun and Education: Website Discoveries, Debates, DiscussionsWhat's new in cyberspace? What exciting new sites have been discovered by forum members? What's the current hot topic and debate? Read on to find out...
9. Discounts and GiveawaysWe haven't been doing too many discounts and giveaways lately. That's partly a reflection of the existence of some reasonable sites dedicated to such things. But I did want to note a few items.
